


“Alessya Lustena Retrac Organa: Never to Willfully, Knowingly Do Harm . . . ”

by Polgarawolf



Series: Star Wars: You Became to Me [38]
Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Prequel Trilogy
Genre: Civil War, Dysfunctional Jedi emotions and relationships, Expanded Universe Character(s), F/F, F/M, Family, Grief/Mourning, Hypocrisy, Jedi Code, Loss, Love, M/M, Medicine, Obi-Wan Kenobi equals unrequited love (unless you're Anakin Skywalker), Original Character(s), Politics, Royalty, Sacrificial ethics, Secret Organization(s), Secrets, Slavery, War
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2008-06-30
Updated: 2008-06-30
Packaged: 2017-11-13 15:42:06
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,546
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/505086
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Polgarawolf/pseuds/Polgarawolf
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>This is fifteen random but essentially chronological moments from the life of Alessya Lustena Retrac Organa, the third and final wife of Prestid Organa. There is an actual story here – one small thread among the vast woven tapestry of life that is the living history of the galaxy, stretched out and twisted, knotted into the whole, curled down among the roots of time, connecting various moments together – but one must read between the lines to capture it. It is not precisely the truth, for the subtle story of these moments is sketched out here in words, and, in the sin of writing down a life, it inevitably changes the shape of things. But it is nevertheless a form of truth. (From a certain point of view . . . )</p>
            </blockquote>





	“Alessya Lustena Retrac Organa: Never to Willfully, Knowingly Do Harm . . . ”

**Author's Note:**

> **Warning:** This story functions as a sort of compressed codex for Alessya Lustena Retrac Organa’s life, as she is going to be written (or at least referred to) in my not even nearly complete AU **Star Wars** series **_You Became to Me_**. If anything doesn’t make sense, please feel free to ask!
> 
>  **Author’s Notes: 1.)** Again, this is compatible with my SW AU series **_You Became to Me_** , including my _Thwarting the Revenge of the Sith_ trio, if you squint at a couple of things sideways and view a few others solely through the lens of Alessya Lustena Retrac Organa’s eyes. **2.)** Although this is technically modeled on a prompt set that I borrowed from somewhere on the LJ (I don’t recall from where anymore, though if someone would like to set the record straight, I’ll add the info for the community in question here in my notes), it’s not really meant to function as a response to the challenge associated with that set. I just used the specific prompts to give me a reason to string together a backstory of sorts for Alessya. **3.)** Readers should please keep in mind that Alessya is fairly strong in the Force and that, while she certainly hasn’t been raised as a Jedi, she has had instruction in the use of her sensitivity (from her mother’s people among the _Ankindematha_ ) and is therefore quite adept at channeling her power/talents into her work as a surgeon and medical professor. **4.)** Readers interested in knowing who the physical models are for original characters like Alessya should please consult the latest versions of my posted lists of cast original and EU characters and for handmaid(en)s and other important Nabooian characters, which are available on my LJ! For clarity’s sake, though, please know that I specifically picture Alessya as Alex Kingston and others in the Organa family or their immediate scope as previously explained in the character sketch/study story for Celly, Alaina, etc., or as on my posted list of cast characters! Please note that characters who may be alluded to but not referenced by name (certain family members of EU or original characters, for example) are considered too minor to be cast at this time, and that readers should feel free to imagine them howsoever they wish! **5.)** Alessya is anything but unobservant, and she is an extremely intelligent lady (hence, most of the relationship labels on this piece). **6.)** Readers should please keep in mind that words that appear Gaelic in nature or else modelled on Gaelic terms are meant as place-holders for non-Basic words (in this case, Alderaanian). If anything doesn't make sense in context, please just ask, and I'll send an English approximation for the word/term! **7.)** The second half of the title for this piece is a slantwise reference to both part of the Hippocratic Oath and the Wiccan Rede, and, in Alessya’s case, functions as a part of both her vows not only as a Healer/surgeon and medical teacher, but a member of the _Ankindematha_ organization, a secret movement within the Jedi Order to return to the old, pre-Ruusan Reformations ways of teaching, gathering recruits, organizing the Order, and etc.
> 
>  **Story Notes:** **1.)** Since this is part of a larger on-going AU series that in some respects fairly closely mirrors or follows events of canon (up to a certain point, anyway), readers should please keep in mind that certain characters and events from the prequel movies/novelizations of the films and even events/places/people referenced in the EU or Expanded Universe may be mentioned or alluded to in this story. If anyone has any questions about whether someone or something is AU, canon, or EU canon, please feel free to ask! **2.)** Readers should probably be aware that I am roughly estimating (guestimating might be a better word) the original publication date for most of the character study pieces in the **_You Became to Me_** series (and indeed most of my stories, especially the ones written over a long period of time), based on when I roughed out notes for them in the story notebooks I carry everywhere with me and when I can recall having worked on certain groups of characters. The year is going to be accurate, but the month might be off and the day will almost certainly be randomly chosen, since the online account I had originally posted many of these stories to no longer exists. I tend to go back and edit things that are in series whenever I get the time or a new idea causes me to have to make room for something else plot-wise, and odds are good that a story could have been edited for typos as recently as the day of its posting here, but the original version will likely be much older and fairly close to the publication date that I attach to it, if anyone's curious!  
> 

**"Alessya Lustena Retrac Organa: Never to Willfully, Knowingly Do Harm . . . "**

 

　

　

 **01.) Askance:** Alessya knows that some individuals look at least a little bit (and, in some cases, a whole lot) askance at her, not only for marrying Prestid (a man twenty-five years her elder) but for doing so less than three full years after the sudden and rather violent death of his second wife; as (potentially) hurtful and frustrating as the small-mindedness of others might be, though, she tries very hard not to worry about it, for she knows that those people are simply betraying both their ignorance of Prestid and his enormous heart and the very strong love that so unexpectedly (for both of them) bound them together (a love so strong that, nearly a decade after his death, she still has no desire of her own to ever remarry or even to attempt to engage in any kind of romantic relationship or liaison with another being).

 **02.) Boy:** She loves her three little girls with all of her heart and soul, no doubt about it, but one of her (surprisingly few) regrets is that she never really got a chance to try for a boy of her own, never got to give Prestid another son, never got to know just how different it is to truly raise a boy, compared to raising girls.

 **03.) Small:** She’s seen the way people look at her, sometimes, when she’s with Bail, and the puerile small minds of such individuals makes her skin want to crawl right off her body (Bail is her husband’s _son_ , for pity’s sake! She may not be that much older than he is, but she still helped to raise him, and she was extremely happily married to his father for the better part of eight years – and would _still_ quite happily be married to him, if not for that damned manufactured plague! – besides which, since Bail had already met, fallen for _hard_ , and basically given his heart away to Obi-Wan Kenobi long before she ever met him, she has had him fixed quite firmly in her mind since the very beginning of their acquaintance and eventual relationship as _second-mother and second-son_ as someone essentially unavailable to anyone else, for _any_ reason [otherwise, there were a couple of her younger colleagues she might have tried to set him up with, if only for an occasional relaxing evening out]), not only because she would literally rather die than to so violate her own sense of ethics and moral turpitude as to be with Bail in the manner such individuals imagine her to be, but because she’s quite certain that Bail would be so completely horrified to discover that the possibility has ever even crossed someone’s mind that he would never be able to look at her quite the same again, and she truly is quite fond of Bail and would suffer if he were to deliberately attempt to be even less present in her life than he already is, because of his work and her own rather busy schedule.

 **04.) Medicine:** Alessya has always been unabashedly glad that it wasn’t her husband who inherited the right to the throne, for she much prefers being able to continue to practice and teach medicine (as she’s always wanted to do), as the mere wife/widow of a noble and noted diplomat, rather than having to essentially drop her life’s work in order to deal with everything that would have been expected of her, as the wife (and later widow) of the Crown Prince of Alderaan.

 **05.) Trip:** A part of her is desperately glad that the sickness took Prestid before it could claim the lives of his two youngest boys, Declin and Valyn, for the trip to Galidraan had been his idea and she’d tried to talk him out of going (so near to the birth of Adrastia) or at least out of taking both boys along, so they could get a chance to know their newest half-sibling a little bit better: if ever Jenna Zan Arbor is truly brought to justice for the many horrors she’s committed, Alessya fully intends to get roaring drunk and then to dance triumphantly on that conscienceless bitch’s grave (which, since she won’t be harming anyone alive except for herself, technically isn’t a violation of her oath as a Healer or her vows to her mother’s people, as even former Jedi Master and Healer Kylea Santeri would admit, if asked).

 **06.) Blame:** Obi-Wan Kenobi is quite possibly the strongest and yet gentlest, most modest and yet most gifted and intelligent man she knows, and, though she also knows that nothing like what Bail must dream of can ever actually come of such a desperate, unswerving affection, she really cannot find it within herself to blame Bail, for loving the young Jedi so very much.

 **07.) Situation:** The chiming of the comm unit startles Alessya out of a light doze after a long shift at the surgeons’ ward, and perhaps it’s because she’s still half asleep (or perhaps it just is that Bail really is that close to true incoherency), but it takes her nearly twenty minutes before she understands that Bail is ranting furiously about some ancient prophecy about a Chosen One and Qui-Gon Jinn being an insensitive ass (the words _amhas_ and _halóir_ and _cábúnach_ and _tuillí_ and _deargamadán_ – along with several other choice insults and curses, in several different languages – are repeated quite a few times) and a former slave from Tatooine named Anakin Skywalker, and it takes nearly an hour of questioning before she finally manages to piece together what Qui-Gon did and what kind of situation he left behind when he got himself killed, on Naboo: though Qui-Gon Jinn has always made her skin crawl horribly (no one should _ever_ treat one who is, for all intents and purposes, an adopted son as coldly – and sometimes as cruelly – and dismissively as she has so often seen that supposedly wise and kind Jedi Master treat Obi-Wan), she certainly did not and would not have ever wanted him to meet an end as messy as the one that he has, on Naboo; thus, she finds her heart not only going out to the young man who’s so suddenly lost the father-figure in his life (and become not only both a full-fledged Jedi Knight and the lone conqueror – and slayer – of a Sith Lord in living memory, but Master to an apprentice he didn’t even get to choose for himself), but her temper also flaring at the sheer unfairness and _wrongness_ of the whole situation, to the point where she becomes incensed enough to strongly suggest that Bail should try to get Obi-Wan and this Anakin to agree to come to Alderaan, and to hell with the Jedi Order and that damned High Council!

 **08.) Culprit:** She finds it ridiculous, that the Jedi Order should cling so tightly to a set of dehumanizing rules (made up and enforced on the Order by a fearful group of politicians who took criminal advantage of the Order’s exhaustion and low numbers, after Ruusan, to manipulate its leaders into agreeing to strip the Order of much of its autonomy and essentially brainwash its new members into not only accepting such ludicrous restraints on their ability to follow the will of the Force but into policing themselves into becoming what has amounted to lapdogs of the politicians, as well) that is known to be the chief culprit in keeping the populations of well over two dozen worlds and several moons populated by humans and near-humans alone (plus the Force alone only knows how many other planets populated by nonhuman sentient species!) from sending their children to the Order to train as Jedi, not only because she has been secretly instructed by individuals who believe in the paramount importance of repealing those terrible rules and customs and returning to the old, pre-Ruusan Reformations traditions, but because the times are so very dark that it strikes her as willfully irresponsible for the Order to embrace ways that all but guarantee the continuance of dangerously low overall numbers within the Order.

 **09.) Silence:** She likes Anakin Skywalker (and is a little bit surprised that she likes him as much as she does, given how hesitant Bail has been to share his thoughts and feelings about the boy and how much the boy obviously disquiets him), and it only takes one visit for her to conclude that this young boy loves Obi-Wan at least as fiercely as Bail does (which, she acknowledges, in all likelihood accounts for Bail’s relative silence on the subject of the boy, for Bail is often quite troubled when he feels himself falling prey to emotions that are illogical, such as jealousy or envy, and will respond with silence and inaction rather than risk saying or doing something irrational), though it takes a couple of visits before she notices (much to her surprise, given both the Jedi Order’s ridiculous rules against attachment and the generally quite private – even reticent – nature of the individual in question) that Obi-Wan seems to be just as powerfully attached to his young Padawan.

 **10.) Right:** Alessya desperately wishes that it were within her power to somehow explain to Obi-Wan and Anakin the reality behind their way of life, in the Jedi Order, and the dangerous destructiveness of the Jedi Code, compared to the basic goodness and inherent workability of the old ways that the Order had of doing things, before Ruusan, before the many terrible Jedi/Dark Jedi and Jedi/Sith wars, so that she could convince the two to leave the Coruscanti Temple for Alderaan and the organization that espouses (and quietly lives their lives in secret support of) those old ways; unfortunately, though, she has no right to expose the _Ankindematha_ to such a potentially dangerous situation (after all, what if she should fail in her attempt, and Obi-Wan take any sensitive information she might share with him to the High Council?), and so instead she must bite her tongue and watch those two fine young Jedi suffer needless agonies, all the while hoping that the will of the Force might somehow intervene in such a way as to bring them to the light of truth of its own accord . . . or that Bail’s attachment to Obi-Wan might somehow, some day, prove strong enough to lure him and his young Padawan away from that Temple to Alderaan, for good and all, not just to visit but to stay.

 **11.) Staff:** She’s rested much easier in her thoughts ever since Bail’s cousin, Sheltay, joined her husband’s son’s staff, not only because she knows that Sheltay is one of the few people able to actually make Bail take adequate care of himself (no matter how busy he might feel he is), but because she knows that Sheltay is intelligent and hard-working and devoted enough to the ideals that Bail believes in to easily be able to quietly and unobtrusively shoulder quite a bit of the day-to-day duties of Bail’s increasingly time-consuming and difficult (not to mention stressful!) job.

 **12.) Match:** Alessya isn’t at all sure that this semi-politically arranged marriage between Bail and Breha is anything like a good idea: it isn’t that she disapproves of Breha Antilles, precisely – by all accounts, the girl seems to be intelligent, capable, loyal, charming, sweet, warm-hearted, and extremely lovely and accomplished – but she fears that the young lady’s apparent focus on the importance of Bail in her life bodes ill for any lasting match between the two (in her opinion, Bail is simply far too busy a man, with a heart already extremely full of devotions to others, to easily make room for another person in his life, much less one who might very well attempt to insist upon her preeminence over all of the others who have already claimed places in his heart, attempting to claim by usurpation a role of central importance in Bail’s life), especially when so much of Bail’s focus is devoted to his duties . . . and to a certain charismatic young Jedi Master; unfortunately, though, her husband’s son seems quite determined to follow through on Master C’baoth’s (rather strongly given) advice to combine the Organa and Antilles families and he has it in his head (for reasons she will not even pretend to understand) that the best way to do this will be by marrying Breha, and so, regrettably, there’s surprisingly little she can do about it, aside from making sure that Bail knows she has serious reservations about his chosen course of action.

 **13.) Pity:** In all honesty, she finds it a great pity that the former Nabooian Queen (now Senator) Amidala and her companions are all so very young: in her opinion, either Padmé or Sabé would have made a fine Queen of Alderaan and a much better match for Bail than Breha (especially since both of them seem to be just as much in love with Obi-Wan as Bail is himself, and all three of them seem to understand and get along with each other so very well that she imagines either of those two young ladies would have been able to reach some kind of civilized understanding with Bail, regarding their wants, needs, and requirements of each other, without fear of the kind of misunderstandings she can already sense are troubling Bail’s marriage to Breha), if only they were but a little closer in age to Bail.

 **14.) Care:** She takes great care in impressing the importance of pursuing one’s loves on her children – of not compromising when it comes to the strongest desires of their hearts and not settling for less than what they most want out of life (be it in terms of a career or a relationship, be it a short fling or a life-long marriage of hearts and souls) – and she only hopes that they will all find something that they love to do (as she loves practicing medicine and teaching it to other beings) and individuals who are worthy of their hearts (as Prestid was, for her) and not feel constrained by politics or what others might expect or want of them to ever trap themselves in (miserable or even loveless) political marriages or pursue careers based on duty rather than desire (as she fears Bail has done).

 **15.) Thrill:** In the wake of the war, the changes being made to both the Order and the Republic frankly thrill her (at last, there’s no more need to hide her beliefs about the Force or the way that any healthy, sane organized society of Force-sensitives should be run!), and, when a teaching chapterhouse for the New Jedi Bendu Order is established on Alderaan, she not only fully plans on seeing to it that she and her daughters are either at or near the very top of the list for new recruits, but is proud to know that the leaders of the _Ankindematha_ have all pledged to come forth, with their lists of names and teaching circles, and volunteer to help organize and lead not only the Alderaanian chapterhouse outside Aldera, but to go off-world wherever they might be most needed and lend their expertise to chapterhouses being established on other planets, too.

　

　

　

　

　

**Author's Note:**

>  **Clafication Note:** Again, in order to more easily keep track of Bail’s family, readers might want to keep the following in mind: in my AU, Bail is born practically in 68 BBY, near the end of what would have been 69 BBY (if events had fallen out as they do in canon, that is), or roughly 954ish years After the Ruusan Reformations and 46ish years Before the Battle of Geonosis (which, remember, occurs in my AU series on Holiday 2 or Productivity Day of the Galactic Standard Calendar, the day that falls in between month five, Nelona, and month six, Helona, in year 25,000 After Founding [of the Galactic Republic] or 1,000 After Ruusan Reformations), with Alaina being born in what would have been ~46 BBY. (Their mother, Zamille dies late in 44 BBY, and their father, Prestid, remarries in 42 BBY, wedding Mazicia and then losing her late in 40 BBY. [I’ve interpreted the EU notation that Mazicia was Queen of Alderaan in the time leading up to the Clone Wars as meaning around the time of the Stark Hyperspace War, which in the EU is sometimes lumped in with the galactic civil war leading up to the establishment of the Empire, due to Palpatine’s tendency to rewrite history, even though it actually happened in 44 BBY.] Prestid then remarries again in 35 BBY, to Alessya Retrac, who has Celly, Rouge, and Tia in ~32, 30, and 28 BBY. Meanwhile, Bail becomes the Crown Prince of Alderaan a few months before he turns twenty-eight, late in 41 BBY. That’s a bit early, given the retcon of Jorus C’baoth’s date of birth, but it fits my Bail and frankly I’m more inclined to go with Zahn’s original date of birth for his character and just presume that the Force would’ve preserved C’baoth to the point where he seemed much younger than he actually was – as often seems to be the case for human Jedi, in both canon and EU, who either haven’t lived extremely hard lives or else dabbled yet overmuch in areas grouped under the heading of the Dark Side of the Force – than to simply trust the retcon and try to arrive at a probable time frame for the Alderaan Ascendancy Contention by adding roughly forty years or so to that date, given Winter’s guestimate of C’baoth’s age in a hologram taken during those proceedings.) Bail and Alaina’s deceased brothers, Declin and Valyn, would have been born in roughly 50 BBY and 48 BBY and died (with their father) late in 28 BBY (not long after Tia was born), and their deceased sister, Merisol, would have been born in roughly 67 BBY and killed in 52 BBY. Moreover, Prestid Organa was born ~95 BBY, while Alessya Retrac was born in ~70 BBY (and before readers freak out about that, please remember that humans live a lot longer in the GFFA and that they also tend to age a lot more slowly, given their level of technology and medical advances, okay?), marrying Prestid when she about 35.


End file.
